Category: Nurture your mind

Each and every one of us is designed with a remarkable capacity for greatness.
And every moment of everyday we perceive the world through our five senses, often infiltrating our core with unconscious imprints.

The media have long been using our energy to direct our attention to messages that shape our perceptions and behavior unconsciously.
When we enter the hamster wheel path of society’s norms, we frequently sleepwalk through life, forgetting universal truths.

Nurturing our mind is the conscious choice of investing time everyday to bring to consciousness the brilliance of our species that far outweighs our limitations.

In our information overload era, we have access to knowledge and wisdom as we never had before. At a click of a button, we can access informative scientific papers, books, Ted Talks, and podcasts. Yet, the average American watches over four hours of often mind-numbing TV per day.

I challenge you to nurture your mind by directing your energy to places that expand your possibilities and enhance your understanding of your limitless potential.

Part two: Improving your relationship with stress-How to establish safety and trust

Last week, I introduced you to my simple, yet effective, approach that I used to become a BFF (Best Friend Forever) with stress so it would no longer be such a barrier to my health and well-being. Following the cumbersome health complications that I experienced when I chose to ignore the effects of stress on my body, befriending stress has become the most effective health improvement intervention for me so far.

Although the idea of “befriending stress” may sound like an abstract concept, it is not very different from the process we use to befriend someone we meet that we like:

  1. We get to know them better.
  2. We create safety and trust between us.

In this section, Stress: Part Two, I will share with you the most profound and unusual pearls of wisdom that I have gathered in regard to how we can create safety and trust in our relationship with stress so we can enjoy a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

  1. Question your perceptions! We are built for fight or flight in response to demands from the environment. It’s nothing personal, just a matter of survival. One of our most primal needs is to connect with others, yet our brain and nervous system are built for war and not for love. This presents us with a great paradox that we have to somehow reconcile to reinstate a sense of safety within and without. Our brain has evolved to give us the greatest survival advantage and that translates into us looking at things from a threatened perspective. We can intercept this scientific truth by literally questioning our assumptions and that which challenges us. For example, if you did not get an “Exceeds” in your performance evaluation, does it really mean that you should have concerns about your job security?
  2. Make a regular practice of choosing the words to your own life story. We are what our experiences have shaped us to be. Most of our memories are stored in our brain without conscious intervention on our part. A memory of a negative experience will get triggered and elicit a response when a situation occurs that mimics sensations of that negative experience. As brilliant as we may be intellectually, most of our actions happen without our permission. For example, if we had a negative parent figure in our childhood, the moment we get close to someone as an adult, implicit memories will resurface of what it was like to depend on someone who was not dependable. Then the relational part of our brain will shut down to disrupt the perceived negative consequences of depending on someone again. We can start re-writing this story by assessing how much of our assumption that the present moment resembles our past is a truth or a story. We can also become a regular participant in deciding if bringing the past into our present is leading us to our desired outcomes.
  3. Embrace the power of your emotions—one emotion at a time. We have been conditioned to be afraid of our own emotions, because well, they have a life of their own! We need to embrace that it is biologically impossible to not make an emotional decision. Prominent neuroscientist, Joseph Le Doux, has shown us that when a threat is perceived by our thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, it only takes eight milliseconds for the message to reach our amygdala, which is responsible for detecting fear, but forty milliseconds to reach our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. Instead of running away from our feelings, what if we fully embrace and trust them by giving them a name and choosing how we allow them to shape our behavior? Making intelligent use of our emotions (otherwise known as emotional intelligence) has been found to be more important than IQ in how well we do in life. You can access a free resource to help you with this endeavor by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
  4. Reconcile differences between expectations and actuality. Our brain perceives difference, or change, as “errors.” When we are promised a sweet-tasting treat and we get something sour instead, two structures in our brain get activated that emit very strong error signals. The two structures are the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala. The activation of these structures draws our metabolic energy away from the part of our brain that supports higher intellectual functioning and results in us acting impulsively and often putting our foot in our mouth. To change this, make it a high priority to identify any parts of your life that present your brain with the taxing job of reconciling differences and, one by one, eliminate them. Do you support healthy living, but find that your health improvement initiatives end the moment you sit in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day with a bag of unhealthy snacks? Do you have a significant person in your life who says they love you but often minimizes you? Recognize all situations that aggravate your brain by showing up as errors, call them by name, and let them go. Your brain will love you for it!
  5. Treat your brain as the best part of yourself. Our brain is our best friend and the CEO of the amazing operation of our incredible body. Improving our relationship with stress involves improving our relationship with ourselves. Although we haven’t been taught how to do that, there are several practices we can learn that are simple, backed up by science, and take only a smidgen of our time. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective and well-documented methods to quiet down the alarming narrative of any story and allow us to infuse our present moment with safety and trust. We can chose any focal point that makes us feel safe and protected as an effective way to build an internal sense of safety and trust. We can simply focus on our breath and recollect all the amazing things the power of our breath accomplishes, like oxygenating our one hundred trillion cells, or activating the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system, which governs rest and digestion. If you are one of the many of us that needs some guidance meditating, I invite you to use some of my favorite guided meditations that you can find here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations.

We modern humans are having such a hard time keeping our nervous system calm and available to serve our higher purpose and objectives in life. Part of the problem is that we have had to turn our brain into a warrior in order to survive throughout the ages.

Ultimately, we all strive to accomplish one, and only one, universal state—to be happy! However, there is not just one type of happiness.

We feel a primal type of happiness when we are in love and we make love to the object of our affection. But there is a different type of happiness that has been a secret until neuroscience uncovered it for us. This other type of happiness does not leave us, like the afterglow of being with the one we love. Instead, we carry this other type of happiness with us, and it shapes our perceptions of the world and how we expect the world to show up for us.

The foundation of this amazing, effervescent happiness hinges upon a baseline feeling of safety.

No matter how well we do in life, happiness will continue to be a fleeting target for us until we are ready to improve our internal sense of safety and trust. Changing the perceptual lens through which we view the world is a powerful way to improve our relationship with stress and increase our health and happiness.

Do You Have a Good Relationship With Stress?

In the midst of this crazy world we live in, fueled with uncomfortable phenomena, one thing that will never discriminate against us, regardless of our race, sex, or socio-economic status is—stress!

Stress has been described as the epidemic of the century. Prominent scientists around the world have provided us with over five decades of evidence that links stress to more than 90% of today’s disease, regardless of the color of our skin or any other of our unique characteristics.

I have had a tumultuous relationship with stress because I did not make friends with it. I am now living with some significant consequences. I have developed a musculoskeletal condition that graces me with chronic pain and restricts my activities to a great degree. Furthermore, my brain has been sculpted to be over-sensitive to stressors. This means that my amygdala (our nervous system’s alarm system responsible for identifying threats) is probably enlarged and my hippocampus (mainly associated with memory, among other critical functions) has probably experienced some shrinkage. So, you can say that finding a solution to the problematic consequences of not having a good relationship with stress has been a big deal for me.

During my diligent study and experimentation to improve my relationship with stress I came across a bewildering realization:

The dire ramifications of stress are not because stress is such a great villain, but because we don’t fully realize just how much power we have to choose how we relate to stressors and to the critical players involved with our stress response! Could it be that our “untamed” power leads us to the troublesome stress symptoms we experience?

What if we use our power to “befriend” stress?

On first thought, you may think the idea of “befriending stress” is a conundrum. The truth is, we all know how to do it. We go through the process of making friends pretty much every day in life.

In fact, making friends involves a simple two-step process:

  1. We get to know someone better.
  2. We establish safety and trust.

What if we followed the same process to improve our relationship with stress?

This week I want to talk about Step One: Getting to know stress better.

  1. What is stress?

Stress is the pressure we feel when our body goes off-balance (homeostasis) to respond to an environmental demand. In small quantities, stress is not necessarily bad as it motivates us to stretch ourselves to meet life’s demands. Imagine if you were an Olympian training to run for a gold medal. Some stress might be helpful to motivate you. Every day, we are all Olympians having to deal with situations that take us off homeostasis, which is our optimal, internal balance of essential bodily functions like temperature and heart rate. Next time you feel the subtle signs that your stress response is activated (for example, if you notice your heart rate has increased) give yourself sixty seconds to assess if the situation at hand is worthy of the activation of your stress response or not.

2. Is the reason for your stress a truth or a story?

What we don’t realize is that most of the time what triggers our stress response is the subtle, momentary interpretation we give to life situations and not the life situations themselves. For example, public speaking in and of itself does not actually pose any significant threat or danger to an organism. However, the thought of possibly forgetting our words and feeling embarrassed has the power to trigger our stress response, which we can immediately feel by the increase in our heart ratem just the same as if we had encountered a shark while swimming in the ocean. What if we shift our attention to simply recognizing how amazing it is that we are just as powerful as a shark or a bear in activating our fight or flight response, instead of allowing the power of our mind to take us off-balance?

 3. Too much of a good thing can be bad.

There are situations that warrant the appropriate elicitation of our stress response. Maybe we are in a car accident and we have to rush to provide aid for ourselves and our loved ones. A temporary, and infrequent, activation of our stress response with ample time to rest and digest what has happened in-between does not lead to health issues. However, we are now estimated to elicit our stress response over ten times a day. We are over-estimating threats and placing our bodies under a tremendous amount of unnecessary strain that does have significant short and long-term health consequences. What if we acknowledge how efficient we are at identifying threats, but shoot for eliminating one unnecessary stress response activation per week?

 4. Balance and optimal performance go hand in hand.

When we identify a situation as a threat, our thoughts and words trigger our brain to engage multiple systems in our body to address the threat. This diminishes the effectiveness of critical structures in our brain, for example, those that govern thinking; and shuts down other essential functions of our body, for example, our immune and digestive systems. In other words, when we operate under our stress response, our power is momentarily diminished and we enter a state of temporary impairment. Additionally, when we are in this defensive mode we cannot learn as well. What if we use the old advice to “pause and take ten breaths,” and then reconsider if we want to label a situation a threat, considering how powerful our thoughts and words are?

5. There are significant consequences to chronic stress.

When we allow our body systems to be used too often to address imaginary fears, like public humiliation, we are essentially exhausting our body systems by asking them to work overtime. Allostasis is the process that our body uses to regain homeostasis after it has been taken off-balance by a stressor. The total sum of all the things our body has to do to get back to its balanced state is called allostatic load. When our allostatic load is greater than our ability to recover, we enter the overload-level of allostatic load, and significant damage to organs and functions can occur. What if we consciously infuse breaks of calm in between jumping through hoops of stress as a means of boosting our resilience to life’s demands? Even sneaking out to the garden to water the plans, or creating a five minute space at work to listen to a guided meditation could be enough to restore balance in our nervous system.

We seem to frequently judge ourselves for our shortcomings, but we do not acknowledge how powerful we can be in creating not just our reality, but also our health and well-being. Although life’s demands are endless and many of them are outside of our control, what is actually within our control is working on building the resources that help us bounce back when something pushes us off-balance.

We are all drawn to rewarding experiences, and we strive to be happy. Reinstating an internal sense of safety and security is one of the most sustainable forms of happiness.

We know how to install a security system in our home to help us feel safe, but do we know how to reinstate a sense of safety in our neurobiology to improve our relationship with stress?

Join me next week for the second part of ways to improve our relationship with stress—how to establish safety and trust with stress and our nervous systems.

We cannot eliminate the sheer volume of stressors, but we can improve our relationship with our body systems and our stress response as a powerful way to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

21 Guideposts to Being Grateful

We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Greece, where I grew up, but I have come to really like this American holiday.

For starters, I like roast turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry relish, but mostly I like Thanksgiving because it is officially the day when we are invited to practice gratitude.

Gratitude is a powerful human emotion. We can choose how to respond to life and make conscious choices about where to invest our attention. I recommend choosing gratitude.

Not that long ago I used to roll my eyes when anyone mentioned the myriad benefits of a gratitude practice. Not only was I a scientist through and through, but I also lived by the philosophy, “no pain, no gain.”

But as it turns out, I was wrong!

Ample scientific evidence exists that clearly proves that the choice to place our attention on elements we are grateful for can lead to more happiness, physical health, and meaningful and satisfying relationships.

It takes twenty-one days to form a habit. I invite you to use the following twenty-one guideposts, as thoughts to start your day. You can also use them as your chosen focal point to redirect your attention to, every time something happens in your day that takes you off-balance.

We have no control over much in life, like the economy or our obnoxious work colleague.

On the other hand, we have complete control over what we choose to put our attention on. Focusing on positive things we are grateful for has a tremendous impact on our happiness, health, and performance.

So, let’s begin!

Day 1: What do you love about yourself today? I invite you to view yourself as the amazing human being that you truly are, free of concerns about your abilities, your age, your body shape or size. Instead, consider how many challenges you have already overcome, how much adversity you have endured, and in how many ways you have positively impacted the world we live in throughout the course of your life.

Day 2: Celebrate what a scientific marvel you are. If you are wondering how a certain part of your anatomy looks in a specific type of outfit, I invite you to shift your attention to the fact that in every second you are alive your brain orchestrates six trillion actions using the 100 trillion cells of your body to keep you in perfect balance. That realization should put any concerns about size and parts of your anatomy into perspective!

Day 3: Take a few moments to appreciate your heart. Consider that no matter how many times your heart is broken over the course of your life, it will continue to beat over 100,000 times per day sending blood to 60,000 miles of blood vessels!

Day 4: Take a few moments to appreciate one aspect of yourself that you usually do not like. Challenging parts of ourselves are a little bit like a bratty child that acts up when ignored. By embracing a negative part of ourselves, for example, our inner critic, we make friends with it and then we can work together toward our purpose.

Day 5: Cherish the power of your breath. Remember that your breath can activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of you that is your natural antidote to the stress response! Isn’t it funny that we look for power externally in things like money and material assets when we have so much internal power to shut down what does not serve us and open the doors to so many wonderful things simply through the power of our breath?

Day 6: Treasure your ability to calm your nervous system on demand.

A calm nervous system halts the production of cortisol, which in large quantities interferes with the optimal functioning of your body systems (immune and digestive, just to name a couple). Did you know you are a fabulous chemist and scientist in the laboratory of your life every moment you are alive? By simply changing the narrative we give to a life situation, no matter how stressful the situation may be, we can calm our nervous system. For example, if we just got laid off, we can acknowledge that the situation is challenging, but focus on how many times we have been able to overcome similar situations in the past, instead of how this is the “end of the world.”

Day 7: Recognize the incredible power you have within your amazing neurobiology! Being in a balanced state of gratitude allows you access to the relational parts of your brain (right hemisphere) and allows you improved functioning of executive regulation (pre-frontal cortex). Is there a person in your life that you would love to share a positive relationship with? Recount five things you love about them before you talk to or see them next time and notice what happens!

Day 8: Be grateful for the gift of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the greatest neuroscience discovery of the last 150 years. We can grow regions of our brain associated with desired traits by simply shifting our attention to having experiences that foster those traits. For example, we grow optimism by consciously shifting our attention to being grateful for the positive sides of even negative experiences.

Day 9: Revere in your ability to activate your reward center and trigger the release of dopamine. You can activate dopamine, our “feel good” hormone, simply by identifying rewarding aspects of all experiences. When our “feel good” hormones get triggered by certain experiences, these experiences are flagged for protection and safekeeping. This means that over time, one positive experience at a time, your automatic response will become gratitude.

Day 10: Fill your heart with gratitude for a person that makes you feel cared for. When we consciously recall people and situations that make us feel good, our body functions (heart rate, temperature, blood pressure) remain at optimal levels. In todays’ era of information overload, we seem to operate from our stress response state quite a bit more frequently than what we were physiologically designed to handle. Thank heavens we have a natural antidote for this problem!

Day 11: Adore your strong muscles today. Do something that gives you the chance to encounter your physical strength. And don’t forget that much like muscle fitness, gratitude sculpts and increases cortical tissue in brain regions that are associated with harmonious emotional regulation. That means that the more time you invest in being grateful, the better you can process and manage negative emotions like fear and anger.

Day 12: Savor and trust in the universe that you are part of. Feel free to let go of what does not serve you, knowing that when you allow yourself to be the beautiful, amazing you who you are in your true essence, the whole universe will conspire to bring to your path all that you need. Have faith and trust the universe.

Day 13: Nurture the joy you hold inside your heart! We are so used to living life from a threatened state focusing on the challenging aspects of existence. Joy is not something that we arrive at in a conditioned manner and trust me—it does not come when we arrive at certain material milestones. We can find joy in the beauty of appreciating mundane details like autumn rain drops or being fully present without getting hi-jacked by past regrets or future worries. Let go of concerns about what’s to come.

Day 14: Be grateful for the ones that caused you pain. I know this does not seem like a typical thing to be grateful for or one that is easy for us to do. I invite you to consider that everything that comes along our path has a beautiful and precious reason and purpose. Acknowledge that when our interaction with another ends up in suffering, it is an incredible, fertile ground for growth for us. What is the message this person is here to give you? What can you do within your control to arrive at a harmonious outcome with another as a result of the lessons learned from this experience?

Day 15: Delight in your ability to be an active participant in reciprocity. Did you know that when you share gratitude with another it spreads like a positive, wonderful, wildfire? It feels good to be the recipient of appreciation and it drives us to “pay it forward” to others. Gratitude allows you to be part of a positivity wave that has the power to triumph over so many unnecessary human conditions, like hate, discrimination, and intolerance.

Day 16: Think about a recent situation when you did something great. How did that feel? Did you know that when you pause and actively recall what something wonderful felt like, you actually enhance your brains ability to replace negative, pre-existing wiring with positivity?

Day 17: Love your brain today. Your immaculate brain cannot focus on too many things at the same time, so if you occupy as many of your neurons (brain cells) as you can with gratitude, you have to let go of thoughts of self-doubt that might come up. This is the basis of many proven strategies, like mindfulness meditation, that have the power to increase our focus on one positive thing and away from our scattered “monkey mind.”

Day 18: Bring consciousness to how brilliant you are. As you go about cooking your meals, pouring your heart into your work, or raising your children, about thirty billion basic nervous system cells are at work forming the fiber of your life. Through nerve cell connections, our brains will select and save the experiences we have taught it to value. You can take action now, by telling your brain what YOU value.

Day 19: You are an inspiration to others simply by the choice of your actions. Consider how many great things you actually do every day. Beyond business plans and professional goal attainments, think of all the times you make someone smile! You have so many choices of actions you can take. I invite you to choose to nurture someone special today, or to simply empower and inspire the people around you by being the wonderful you that you are.

Day 20: Enshrine your power of responsibility and accountability. By recognizing which of your chosen views and actions do not take you to a destination you wish to arrive at, you actually give yourself the gift of choice. You can then play with your glorious ability to change anything that does not serve you. This is our natural antidote to learned helplessness, which fosters depression, as Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, has shown us.

Day 21: Embrace the myriad of elements that make you who you are. You are just as amazing as Aristotle or Albert Einstein! Embrace your beauty and all of your imperfections, decide which ones you want to work on, and rest peaceful that you are more than enough just the way you are.

A fellow Greek by the name of Plato once said: “A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.”

It is truly amazing that over 2,500 years after Plato noted this modern research has proven him right.

But what is more amazing is that by making the simple choice of practicing gratitude everyday, we can harness the promethean light of Greek philosophers and modern science to illuminate our path to optimal well-being.

Happy Thanksgiving!